08 August 2012

Killing the cat

Rico says that would be Curiosity, of course, and he'll never tire of making that bad pun, sorry.
On a more serious note, Jonathan Woods has a Time article , with lots of photos, about the little rover that went to Mars:
Curiosity is carrying the most advanced payload of scientific gear ever used on Mars' surface, a payload more than ten times as massive as those of earlier Mars rovers. Its assignment: investigate whether conditions have been favorable for microbial life and for preserving clues in the rocks about possible past life.
Technicians work on the new Mars rover, Curiosity. Nine months before Curiosity's scheduled launch, the space agency said the mission has burned through its reserves and needs an extra $82 million to complete testing before liftoff.
An engineer is dwarfed by Curiosity's parachute, inside the world's largest wind tunnel at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California. The parachute is more than one hundred and sixty feet in length, and opens to a diameter of just over fifty feet.
Preparing for integration to Curiosity, technicians help guide the rocket-powered descent stage over the rover at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility on 23 September 2011.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying NASA's Curiosity rover lifts off from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on 26 Novenber 2011.
Remarkably, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance orbiter captured this image of the Curiosity rover, still connected to its fifty-foot-wide parachute, in the midst of its descent towards its landing site at Gale Crater.
An image taken through the wide-angle lens on one of the rover's Hazard-Avoidance cameras shows the terrain of Mars the rover now knows as home. These engineering cameras are located at the rover's base. These early images are lower resolution; larger color images are expected soon when the rover's mast, carrying high-resolution cameras, is deployed.

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